The method of choosing and then screening motion pictures for the Sarajevo Film Competition (SFF) is a deeply private expertise for programmer Rada Šešić.
“I will reveal to you one secret,” Šešić confides. “After I introduce the film and the maker, I stay in the cinema and listen to how the audience ‘breathes,’ how it reacts; I shudder every time someone opens the door with a bang or leaves in the middle of the film, it hurts me to see a restless, fidgeting audience.”
Šešić might be holding her breath each time for the screenings of the 21 movies (together with 19 in competitors) on this 12 months’s documentary part, picked from 275 submissions.
“Each screening feels like I am a student taking an exam, and I, too, not just the directors, feel that the screening in Sarajevo is a special occasion, somehow solemn,” she says. “We have many world or international premieres each year, and that moment when the film meets the audience is usually quite emotional.”
Šešić charges this 12 months’s choice as “very mature, engaging, and compelling films,” which might be judged by a jury that includes Mandy Chang (founder and inventive director at documentary label Plain), Marek Hovorka (founder and director of the Ji.hlava Worldwide Documentary Film Competition in Czechia) and acclaimed Chinese language documentary-maker Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle).
The competitors will open with the world premiere of Hungarian filmmaker Anna Rubi’s newest function Your Life With out Me, which follows a gaggle of aged moms of their efforts to make sure the assist system they’ve established for his or her handicapped grownup youngsters will proceed after these moms cross away.
There might be a robust Ukrainian presence this 12 months — Sarajevo has opened up house for Ukrainian administrators within the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion — with tasks together with the world premiere of Dad’s Lullaby, the function debut of acclaimed Ukrainian short-filmmaker Lesia Diak, a have a look at the lives of traumatized troopers as they return residence to their households. Diak might be joined by Maria Stoianova whose Fragments of Ice traces the director’s household historical past as a mirror the historical past of her nation; and Olga Chernykh’s A Image to Bear in mind, a portrait of three generations of Ukrainian ladies, from the times of the USSR till at present.
“In addition to the cinematic qualities, our selection very powerfully depicts the reality around us; the films are pretty bold, straightforward, and bravely done,” says Šešić. “I was amazed by the intimacy achieved in so many personal authors’ stories.”
Two Croatian productions are among the many doc highlights this 12 months. The BBC has already picked up Goran Devis’ Pavilion 6, a have a look at the problem of COVID vaccinations made with a contact of humor, whereas Silvestar Kolbas’ Our Kids additionally finds the humorous in his look again over his household’s 30-plus 12 months historical past questioning “parenting, marriage and life harmony.”
Šešić factors in direction of Bosnian-born Maja Novakovic’s On the Door of the Home, Who Will Come Knocking as “an ode to the human spirit, celebrating the almost sacred connection between man and nature.”
“Documentary films are highly relevant in our region,” says Šešić. “They are a kind of barometer of a society measuring the political and social ‘temperature;’ they signal what is boiling under the surface. Often, they serve as instruments of social and political discussion, engaging us in meaningful conversations.”
She provides: “Sometimes, taboo issues do not reach mainstream society for a long time. They are constantly overlooked, neglected, and pushed ‘under a carpet’ yet they must be seen and talked about. Gender issues, post-war traumas, domestic violence, and silence around it. Well-made documentaries have the power to trigger those debates.”
Documentaries are additionally a part of the SFF’s DNA, she says, relationship again to a three-day screening schedule 20 years in the past, and since increasing into platforms together with the Coping with the Previous program, a True Tales Market, and a Docu Tough Minimize Boutique which is “instrumental in helping many regional documentary projects on their way to reaching international audiences.”
“These non-competitive yet exceptionally important programs bring relevant narratives to be heard and discussed,” says Šešić. “I am excited every year about screenings of the films chosen because the festival is all about encounters between films and the audience and the filmmakers discussing their work.”
And she or he concludes: “The festival in Sarajevo has a faithful, savvy audience interested in documentary cinema. This audience responds to the relevance and intrigue of the story but also knows how to respect the author’s artistic expression. The documentary films in our competition give the viewer food for thought that may well, in the long run, bring about positive change.”
